It was last period on a Friday afternoon and April was finally warming up. I had finished reading Wilbur's "The Writer" to my class, and finished coaxing out every last comment on metaphor and meaning that this crew was capable of on such a fine spring afternoon. Cruel to hold them captive in my classroom, and crueler still to ask them to follow this reading with an attempt at imitation. If it had been within my scope of authority to dismiss us all for the day, you can be sure I would have. But as it wasn't, I continued my month-long work of guiding these kids to finding their poet potential.
Most of the kids had settled in to write their own metaphor poems without much reluctance, but J, sitting front and center, had been squirming in his chair for the better part of ten minutes. When I finally made my way over to him, I leaned down to his level, resting my hands on his desk, and asked him how it was coming.
"Miss," he widened his eyes at me, "I'm not made for this."
I laughed, collapsed my head into my arms rested on his desk, and laughed some more. The delightful surprise of his dramatic (and poetic!) confession was the cherry on top of a long week of comically trying individual conferences and class-wide lessons. When I looked up at him again, he was gazing at me unamused, resigned to wait out my silliness until I was prepared to take him seriously and excuse him from this and all future creative writing assignments.
I share with J a looming suspicion that I am ill-suited for writing. Each day I wish that I was writing, and think about things I could write about, and how I could write about them, and how I might write the writing I'm reading better than it's written. But I hardly write. And so I keep this possibility in my mind that I could write something, maybe even publish something, and maybe by never actually pursuing it I keep it safe as an option.
My students mostly don't care about being writers, and feel certain that they aren't. But they are, I tell them every day. You can even be a good writer! The only thing you need to be to be a good writer, I tell them, is honest. I say this like it is easy, and as if this knowledge alone will produce words. But you've got to write too. You've got to write even when you suspect you might not be made for it.
